The biggest alert being raised by medical experts over Colorado’s permissive pot culture is the threat to youth, from the womb to lifelong effects.

A symposium Friday by the Colorado School of Public Health on “Marijuana and Public Health” covered topics as diverse as traffic safety and the chemistry of pot’s pungency and potency, but the gravest concerns appeared centered on the risks to children.

Pot use is only legal for those over 18, but the greater accessibility of pot in the state seems to have trickled down to greater exposure for children.

Pregnant women who use marijuana should know it easily passes through the placenta to the fetus, said Dr. Laura Borgelt, associate professor at the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and School of Medicine.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that although THC, the main chemical compound in marijuana, crosses the placenta, the placenta does somewhat limit fetal exposure because fetal THC concentrations are lower than maternal concentrations. However, THC and metabolites do act on the fetus’ developing biological systems, alter uterine blood flow and alter maternal behavior. Marijuana has been shown to alter brain neurotransmitters and biochemistry.

The long-term effects, according to the academy, is that marijuana use by the pregnant woman has been associated with deficits in the child’s “problem-solving skills requiring sustained attention and visual memory, analysis and integration, and with subtle deficits in learning and memory.”

The academy strongly recommends mothers breastfeed infants exclusively for about six months, followed by continued breastfeeding as other foods are introduced for 1 year or longer. And the academy even says that maternal substance abuse does not always mean she shouldn’t breastfeed. Yet certain drugs that accumulate in human milk, such as cocaine and cannabis, do have a negative effect on the infant’s long-term neuro-behavioral development. In other words, a woman who uses cannabis shouldn’t breastfeed.

Dr. George Sam Wang of Children’s Hospital Colorado said the incidence of children ending up in hospital emergency rooms after ingesting marijuana has increased dramatically since legalization of medicinal pot here in 2009.

Adolescents who regularly use marijuana (20 days a month or more) are two to four times more likely to develop psychosis than adolescents who do not, said Dr. Paula Riggs, professor and director of the Division of Substance Dependence in the Department of Psychiatry at the CU School of Medicine.

Between the ages of 10 and the late 20s, Riggs said, young peoples’ brains are under construction, and THC is very disruptive.

And adolescents are at greater risk of becoming chronic users once they’ve tried cannabis, she said. While one of 11 adults who try pot progress to regular use, she said, one out of six adolescents who try it will become chronic users.

Where is the cacophony of legalization loons on the subject of children’s health and teenage brains. They know when to be silent.

I wish the Colorado doctors hadn’t been silent when the medical pot nose got under the tent.

RobertChase

Questions end with question marks. You probably missed it, but the article does not assert that cannabis causes any harm to children’s brains; possibly you are unable to distinguish between corroborated assertions and insinuations. As for Colorado’s doctors, they didn’t declare cannabis a medicine; the People of Colorado did, and Colorado’s scientifically-incurious medical Establishment is just as ignorant of cannabis’ therapeutic application as they were fourteen years ago.

RobertChase

“Pot is … deemed medically beneficial, but risks for kids scare health pros” — what risks? Be specific. “… the greater accessibility of pot in the state seems to have trickled down to greater exposure for children …” — what does your opinion have to do with it? Your insinuations do not amount to a hill of beans. It would seem that we are not ready to study cannabis objectively — Gov. Hack is determined just to shower Dr. Thurstone & Co. with money; his mission, to turn back the legalization of cannabis by fabricating and insinuating harms to children.

Olivia Clark

I think it is a common understanding that there are a lot of things kids cannot do. Their body is clearly not as developed as adults. No matter how smart they become at school they can never be smarter than adults. Kids are kids, they don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. This is where parental guidance is needed. If medical pot is being practiced by a family member or by someone in the neighborhood, kids should not be exposed to those kinds of environment.

Electa Draper is the health writer for The Denver Post and has covered every news beat in a 22-year journalism career at three newspapers. She has a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's in journalism.